


stay with me, go places

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment
Genre: A Touch of Fake Married Because I Have no Shame or Self-Respect, Drinking Games, Feelings About National Parks, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips, marriage pact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:39:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22930993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: “Never have I ever,” Shane says, feeling his way delicately around the syllables, making nice with all the consonants and vowels, “hooked up with a friend at a wedding.”Neither of them drinks. Neither of them breathes, either.Ryan wants to curl in on himself, to kick his feet and pound on the wood of the pier. He wants to throw his head back and yell up to the sky. The shock, the pure adrenaline of the sudden turn this night has taken, has punched right through the chill of his high.Instead he presses his fingernails into the palms of his hands, giddy and terrified, and asks, “Why, do you want to?”
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 168
Kudos: 1199





	stay with me, go places

**Author's Note:**

> a few days ago "what if they hooked up at a wedding??" flew into my head and then this came flying back out. thanks to my dear Catt/drunkkenobi for the beta. title's from ["go places" by the new pornographers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH34gBwtXok), which is a difficult band to explain to your mom that you like, let me tell you what. 
> 
> this fic isn’t sponsored by Hertz, but hey, it could be. hmu on tumblr, Hertz.

*

Ryan used to love weddings.

He’s been to over two dozen since he graduated college, which is par for the course when you’re in your late twenties and you were in a frat. He’s always had a girlfriend in tow, though. This is the first wedding he’s ever attended stag in the whole of his adult life. 

It’s not as fun alone.

He could probably have rounded up a date, but he’d felt a little strange about being invited in the first place. He and Andrew were never particularly close, even when they worked together. Ryan knows perfectly well he’s only here because it would have been awkward to invite Shane and Steven but not him.

As the third Watcher boy, Ryan completes the set, so here he is at a table full of old BuzzFeed acquaintances watching Andrew lead Thespi onto the dance floor for their first dance as a married couple, clapping along with the rest of them and feeling strangely out of place.

It’s just weird. His life has moved on, but not in the ways he expected. He’d always thought he’d be among the first of his friends to get married, and now he’s nearly thirty and further away from it than ever. He thought he’d be at BuzzFeed until there was no more BuzzFeed, until some other media company subsumed it, but now he’s got his own fledgling business and all the attendant fears and worries. 

He’s not _sorry_ about the direction his life has taken, not at all. And obviously thirty is still young. There’s just something about a wedding to make him feel lonely, and to make him wonder if the decision to prioritize work—even just for now—was the right one.

Ryan nudges Steven, who turns to look at him, a bite of salad halfway to his mouth. “Did you feel weird about not being asked to be a groomsman?”

Maybe Steven’s having an off night too, and they can sit here and be melancholy and introspective together. That would be better, Ryan thinks, than being a lone party pooper.

“Not really,” Steven says, and he does seem completely at peace with it. “Adam and Andrew have always been closer. They’ve always done all the Tasty stuff together along with Worth It, and now that I’m not at BuzzFeed—” he shrugs, taking a break to chew. “He and Thespi wanted a small wedding party, so no hard feelings there.”

From Ryan’s other side, Shane leans in. Ryan thinks it’s funny that he’s been seated between them, as if he needs the buffer on either side to make it easier for him. Probably the bookending was random; probably he’s reading into it too much, forever self-consciously imagining that people are thinking about him more than they are. But because he’s in a mood, it feels deliberate.

“You dodged a bullet, honestly, man,” Shane says, gesticulating with a hand holding a buttered dinner roll. “Being a groomsman is the worst.”

“I always liked it,” Ryan says. He’s been in a fair few weddings himself. “The camaraderie is nice. Helping see your buddy into the next part of his life—it’s nice.”

“See, that’s because you believe in it,” Shane says. “The _institution_. You’ve got warm, fuzzy marriage feelings. Every fiber of your being is longing for it, I can tell.”

“You don’t want to get married?” Steven asks, and Ryan rolls his eyes in anticipation of what’s to come. He and Shane have had this argument before, drunk at some party or another, and Shane’s got a predictably hipstery, cool-guy answer.

“I don’t object to it or anything, I just don’t think it’s necessary. A lot of people do it because it’s, you know, what you do next. I’m not sure that’s very romantic. I assume I’m outnumbered in present company.”

Steven smiles. He looks down at his plate, a little bashful, the way he gets sometimes when he’s talking about his faith with people who don’t share it. He shrugs. “It’s a covenant. It’s holy. Look at Andrew right now. When have you ever seen him smile that much? When has he ever looked at someone the way he looks at her?”

They all three turn to watch Andrew and Thespi on the dance floor, talking and laughing quietly to each other. It’s true: Andrew’s practically glowing, radiating a certainty and joy that makes him almost unrecognizable. Ryan doesn’t look at that and see cherubic, fat baby angels beaming down on them from the heavens or anything, but he can sort of see why someone might.

“Well, I’m not saying it’s not right for some people,” Shane concedes. “I’m just not sure it’s right for me.”

“Cynic,” Ryan says. He plucks Shane’s roll out of his hand and shoves it in his mouth whole before Shane can steal it back.

“Dupe of the wedding industrial complex,” Shane shoots back, but it’s without bite. “Jesus, will you please chew with your mouth closed? You’re embarrassing me. I can’t take you anywhere nice.”

And it _is_ nice. It’s a beautiful, tasteful wedding, at a resort on Lake Tahoe. Close enough to not wreck everybody’s PTO plans, far enough away that it feels like a long weekend vacation.

It’s pleasant to get a change of scene. Ryan had spent part of the afternoon on the balcony of the room he’s sharing with Steven, enjoying the view of the lake and the tree-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevadas behind it. He just wishes he had someone to share it with.

“I’m just,” Ryan says, and he sighs. “I just thought, you know, I’d be—whatever. Never mind. It’s stupid.”

Shane’s face softens.

“Yeah, I know,” he says. “Buck up. After a good meal and a few dances with one of the bride’s beautiful cousins you’ll feel better.”

“You know me,” Ryan says. “Always on the lookout for a future ex-Mrs. Malcolm.” 

“Hey, you’re a catch, pal. I’d marry you.”

“That might have more weight if you hadn’t _just_ finished saying you don’t believe in marriage.”

Shane shrugs. He grabs another roll from the basket for himself and begins to industriously butter it. “I’m trying to make you feel better here.”

“Well, cut it out. It isn’t working.”

“If you think about it,” Steven says, “Shane and I basically did marry you, legally speaking. Signed the contracts and everything. It doesn’t get much more committed than that.” 

“See,” Shane says, pointing at Steven. “Locked that _down_. The women of Los Angeles are just going to have to seethe with jealousy that they didn’t get there first.”

Ryan knows they’re just trying to help, but it isn’t really helping. He loves Watcher, he loves his work—he even loves the two doofuses on either side of him—but it’s not enough. He’s tired of going home alone to a cold bed. He misses _kissing_, misses the simplest affectionate touches that he grew accustomed to over the course of ten years of steady girlfriends.

He knows that learning how to be happy alone is an important skill to have, that this is an opportunity for personal growth. He could pick up a new hobby or something. He could re-invest in some friendships he’s let slide. There are other ways to be personally fulfilled.

It’s just harder to remember that at a wedding, surrounded by people in love, talking about love and toasting to it and dancing cheek-to-cheek.

“I’ll be fine,” he says, taking a swig of champagne. “I just need to stop feeling sorry for myself.”

*

It’s really not so bad. He steals dances with a few of the beautiful cousins, as Shane suggested; he laughs and flirts and drinks champagne. He catches up with old friends. Ryan’s never been one to say no to an open bar or free cake, and he’s not about to start now.

There are the big group dances too, and those are always good for a laugh. It’s worth the cost of a wedding gift just to watch Shane fight his way through the Cha-Cha-Slide, against all of his body’s objections.

“I can’t go down low, Ryan!” he says with a grunt, flailing out his arms to stop himself from falling on his ass. “This meatsack wasn’t made for it.” 

“How are you so bad at this?” Ryan asks, getting funky with it as the song instructs. “The song tells you exactly what to do!”

“I don’t think you understand what it’s like in here, Ryan,” Shane says grimly. “My brain hears the words, but in my limbs there’s nobody home.”

Steven leaves the party early to go to bed, because he has a way of politely excusing himself from parties when the drinking kicks into high gear. As things start to wind down Ryan’s feeling a bit at odds and ends, not sure what to do with himself. He doesn’t want to wake Steven up, and anyway he doesn’t feel ready to go to sleep yet.

He can tell it’ll be a night for tossing and turning, and he isn’t looking forward to it.

Shane must be able to tell, because at about eleven he finds Ryan and taps him on the shoulder.

“Wanna go down to the lake and smoke?” he asks, patting his pocket. “Get some fresh air?”

As soon as he says it, Ryan realizes that _is_ what he wants. He’s stifling under the _weddingness_ of it all, the soft twinkle of the LED fairy lights and the fresh flowers and the Etta James coming from the DJ’s speakers. All the things he always found so charming about weddings feel, tonight, like jabs at his expense. Some air would do him good.

“Lead the way,” he says, grabbing onto the back of Shane’s jacket for good measure as they pick their way off the still-crowded dance floor and out a door to the back patio. He’s got his glass clutched in the other, unwilling to leave a mostly-full drink behind.

It’s a bit of a walk down to the lakeside, getting darker and more remote the further they get from the bright lights of the resort, but Ryan doesn’t mind. Shane out of doors is the opposite of Shane on a dance floor: entirely at home, entirely at peace, and possessing excellent instincts that Ryan has no qualms about following.

The resort has some lakefront pagodas with fire pits and real seating, but Shane takes them further still, until they find an entirely secluded pier. 

He sits down, taking off his shoes and socks, meticulously tucking his shoelaces in and placing his socks in his shoes. He puts his shoes and his glass behind him for safe-keeping, and when he dips his feet in the lake, he whistles. “Cold.”

Ryan follows his example, kicking off his own shoes with considerably less care. The water _is_ cold—too cold for comfortable swimming even now at the tail end of a long, hot summer, even here at the edge of the lake—but it feels good on his heels after an evening in too-tight dress shoes.

Shane pulls a joint and a lighter out of his pocket. He lights up and takes a drag, and then offers it to Ryan.

Ryan takes it gratefully, pulling almost too hard, eager for the pot to do its job and relax him.

“Wanna talk about it?” Shane asks.

Ryan thinks. It’s a rare offer from Shane, who does not prefer to talk about feelings and who certainly doesn’t like to talk about romantic stuff. He’ll listen if Ryan’s having relationship problems and needs to vent, but it’s unusual that he would volunteer. Maybe Ryan should take advantage of it.

On the other hand, he doesn’t really want to. He’d rather just get high and drunk and sleepy, here under the stars. There’s no reason he should let his own pathetically foul mood stand in the way of having a nice night.

“Nah,” he says. “Nothing to talk about. Just…a lot of nothing, y’know?”

Shane nods. “Wanna play a game instead?”

He takes a flask out of his pocket too, waves it playfully in the air.

“Jesus, what else have you got in there? It’s like a Mary Poppins bag.”

“I was an Eagle Scout, Ryan,” Shane says, low and rumbly, a little stern, as if Ryan should have never doubted him. “The degree to which I am always prepared would shock you.”

Ryan’s still got plenty of scotch in his glass, and he swirls it around now, thinking.

“Never have I ever gone to a wedding stag before,” he says. Which he guesses is kind of talking about it, but it’s easier under the guise of a drinking game.

“Never?” Shane asks. He takes a swig from his own glass.

“Never. It hits different.” Ryan takes another hit of the joint and passes it back to Shane. He’s already starting to feel it, that floaty emptiness in his head, the tingling in his extremities.

“I guess it would,” Shane agrees.

“Every wedding I’ve ever been to as an adult, I’ve looked at the girl next to me and I’ve thought, _she’s the one, that’ll be us someday_. And you know what? Every single time, I was wrong. What a schmuck.”

“Nah. You just love _love_,” Shane says. “Or else you love the idea of beating love’s big boss battle. You’re too impatient for it. You can’t just skip ahead, you’ll miss some of the best parts.”

“Probably true,” Ryan says. He’s just tired of feeling like this: lonely, and pathetic for needing people so much when others seem perfectly able to just be alone, their own whole person. Shane can do that, and Ryan envies him. “Okay, you go.”

“Hm. Alright. Never have I ever proposed marriage.”

Ryan lets it hang there in the air for a long moment, uncertain. But the rules of the game are sacrosanct, and it’s _Shane_, and Shane wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t already suspect. So he takes a reluctant drink.

He’s never told anyone this before, not even his parents. He still has the ring in a drawer somewhere, even though at the time he really couldn’t afford to not return it. Time and subsequent relationships have done their work, dulling the pain a little, but the sting of it is still there if Ryan goes looking for it, as he has done tonight.

“Really?” Shane asks. His tone is so carefully, neutrally curious, so free of judgment or pity, that Ryan feels a burst of gratefulness.

“Yeah. I asked her to marry me, and she decided to move across the country instead.” 

“So I take it that was a no?”

Ryan laughs in spite of himself. “I guess so. It would’ve been wrong, anyway. We were too young. She was my first love, my first everything. She was right to say no.”

“I don’t know. I bet you’re a hard man to say no to.” 

“Evidently not.” Ryan takes another drag. “Okay, smart guy. Never have I ever hooked up with a stranger at a wedding.”

“Yeah, because you always bring a date,” Shane points out. Then he takes a drink.

Ryan cackles. “No way! Spill.”

Shane shrugs one shoulder. He smiles but tries to hide it, like he’s afraid Ryan will think he’s bragging or being crass. That’s so very far from Shane’s style that Ryan could never think it. “Not much to spill. People are in the mood for it at weddings, you know—or, hey, maybe you don’t. Wound up in bed with a bridesmaid at my cousin’s wedding probably a decade ago. And then last year, at a college buddy’s wedding, I…made a friend.”

“You dirty dog,” Ryan says, grinning. It’s the absolute chillest version of frat house talk imaginable, _frat-lite_, but Shane still goes pink and looks away, up at the stars, out at the dark lake. They never talk like this. Sometimes Ryan’s wondered if Shane isn’t into sex at all, which would of course be none of his business anyway. “Was she pretty?”

Shane pulls his feet out of the water, scooching back on the pier to lay on his back, looking up. “You know, I don’t really remember much about them.”

Ryan squints down at him then, to get a better look at his face where the moonlight’s hitting it. It’s such a closed-off answer, designed to prevent any follow-up, and it telegraphs discomfort even though Shane’s body language and face are relaxed.

“Your turn,” he says. Then he lays down too, next to Shane, nothing touching but their hair and the tips of their elbows.

Shane’s still staring up and away, with a faraway, unbothered look on his face that suggests the pot is doing its job.

“Never have I ever fooled around in the BuzzFeed offices,” Shane says. Then he snickers, because he knows he’s got Ryan there.

“Oh my god, it was one time.”

“Drink! It was the Christmas party, wasn’t it? Two years ago.”

“How did you know?”

“You guys disappeared for like half an hour, and when you came back you were all flushed and stammery and she wouldn’t stop giggling. Just promise me you didn’t do it on top of the Unsolved desk, Ryan. Tell me you didn’t. Lie to me if you have to.”

“She wanted to see where we filmed,” Ryan says, evasive. He snorts when Shane gives a drawn-out, hyperbolic groan. “Oh, like you never thought about it.”

“Every damn day, but unlike you I can exercise self-restraint.”

“Sometimes a man’s gotta shoot his shot, dude.”

“I just wish you hadn’t _shot it_ all over where we work, is all.”

Ryan’s overcome with giggles then. The laughter combined with the smoke gives him a coughing fit, and he has to roll over onto his side and take another drink just to calm the coughing.

He feels so loose when he lays back down, boneless and stretched-out, his earlier unhappiness forgotten. The air is crisp and cool this late, but not uncomfortably so, and when he shivers he’s not sure it’s from chill.

“Never have I,” Ryan starts, playing on a hunch, but then he pauses to decide if he wants to say it. It would be stranger to not say it, now that he’s thought of it, and anyway he wants to see what Shane will do. “Never have I ever kissed a guy.”

Shane drinks without hesitation, and Ryan’s not surprised so much as he is unrepentantly nosy.

“You must have gone out of your way not to,” Shane says. “Considering the amount of time you spend drunk to the point of excess around men.”

“No, it just never came up,” Ryan says, which is true. “Or maybe I’m just no good at picking up on vibes from guys. Other than Curly.”

“Not exactly subtle, those vibes.” Shane’s quiet for a bit, except for the slight hiss his mouth makes when he inhales from the joint and then the slow whistle as he breathes smoke out and up. “Why, do you want to?”

Ryan’s not certain it’s an offer; Shane could just be making conversation. On the other hand, if it _is_ an offer it’s one of the more interesting ones he’s had. Out here, far away from home, away from the cameras that run their lives, it feels deceptively low-stakes.

“Maybe. Everyone wonders, right?”

Shane rolls over on his side. He goes up on his elbow, so he’s looming over Ryan, looking down at him. Wordlessly he offers Ryan the joint to hold, and then he takes Ryan’s face in his hands with surprising tenderness.

So, an offer after all.

“Stop me,” he says.

Ryan doesn’t.

God, it’s been a while. Ryan’s whole body lights up at the first gentle press of Shane’s lips to his, remembering how good it feels to _touch_, to be close to someone like this. 

It’s surprisingly romantic. The lake, the stars, Shane’s hand warm enough where it’s splayed across his sternum that he can feel it through the layers of his shirt and undershirt. Ryan’s not sure why he thought kissing someone _wouldn’t_ be romantic—because it’s a guy, because it’s _Shane_, maybe, who knows—but he was quite wrong.

There’s something about kissing while high, too. It’s better than alcohol, Ryan thinks, because instead of feeling less he feels _more_. Instead of time speeding up it slows down, goes all thick and syrupy and honey-sweet. Ryan feels trapped in it, held firm in the moment like a mosquito in amber, but not in a bad way.

He opens his mouth, encouraging Shane to kiss him more deeply, more naturally. It feels so good that without meaning to he makes a tiny noise and feels Shane’s mouth turn up in a smile against his own. Ryan thinks he could do this for a very long time, until he’s too sleepy to keep his eyes open.

Shane’s a good kisser, careful with him and paying attention. He can feel the moment when Ryan shifts from unsure, _being kissed_, to sure, _kissing back_, and he himself shifts to accommodate it, pressing more firmly. He tilts Ryan’s head back, grazes his tongue along Ryan’s, and then with a farewell stroke of his thumb along Ryan’s jaw and a friendly tug of Ryan’s tie he’s pulling away again.

Ryan’s had a lot of first kisses, which is how he knows that was a pretty great one by most metrics. He brings a hand up to his tingling mouth and giggles.

“I’d forgotten how nice that feels,” Shane says.

“It’s me,” Ryan says, still giggling. “I’m that good.”

“The pot, idiot,” Shane says fondly. “Haven’t messed around while high in ages.”

“What’s it like for you?”

Shane considers this. “It’s like a hot tub,” he says. “Warm, and weightless, and there’s nothing to do but sit with it and feel good. And like if you keep kissing you’ll just…dissolve, all your atoms will come flying apart and you’ll just be steam on the air.”

“You _are_ high,” Ryan says, impressed. He’s also thinking about _messing around_, trying that on for size, deciding how he feels about it.

Shane refills their glasses from his flask. “My turn. Never have I ever shotgunned a joint.”

“I find that very hard to believe.”

“What can I say? The friends I usually smoke with are not those kinds of friends.”

And until very recently, until tonight, Ryan supposes he fell into that category. He wonders if he falls into a new category now, if he’s been transformed with one kiss into _that kind of friend_. 

“Never? No girlfriend? No boyfriend?” Ryan asks, and Shane just shrugs. “Well, come here, then, big guy,” he says, sitting up.

“So I just—”

“I’ll inhale,” Ryan says, “and then you just put your mouth over mine. Make a seal, and I’ll blow. God, I can’t believe there’s a single thing about weed I could teach you.”

“Take it easy on me, it’s my first time,” Shane says, and it makes Ryan’s stomach flutter.

Ryan takes a hit and tilts his jaw in Shane’s direction, _c’mere_. Shane leans down and fits his mouth over Ryan’s, and it’s so much _less_ than their kiss but also in some ways more; more intimate, more strange, more terrifying. He’s only ever done this with girls he was either with or wanted to get with, as a kind of foreplay, and he’s hyperaware of that now.

Ryan exhales, blowing the smoke into Shane’s mouth in lazy puffs, and he feels Shane tremor almost imperceptibly as he takes what Ryan’s giving him, and that’s what gets him: the knowledge that Shane’s been thrown by this too. That he _feels_ it.

Shane pulls back. He lies down again, clutching his head like he’s dizzy. The air around them is heavy and charged, such that Ryan thinks if he passed his hand through the empty space over his head he’d feel resistance.

“Hey, little sister, shotgun,” Shane sings under his breath out of nowhere, his very best Billy Idol drawl. “It’s a nice day for a—_white wedding_.” He wheezes, and his laughter’s contagious; it makes Ryan wheeze too, and press the coolness of his glass to the pulse point of his wrist.

“Never have I ever taken advantage of a drinking game to see if I could get in someone’s pants,” Ryan says when he’s calmer, and Shane flaps his hand around uselessly looking for his own glass, nearly knocking it over in the process. Ryan also drinks, because honestly, who hasn’t?

He didn’t see it coming, but he’s not annoyed about it. He’s sure it wasn’t calculated, not like that. Although it does make him wonder just _how_ bad he is at picking up vibes. Possibly he needs them hand-delivered and gift-wrapped, with his name written in full calligraphy on the tag.

“Your turn,” Ryan says.

“I’m deciding.”

“Well, hurry up, I’m…” Something. Ryan’s _something_. He doesn’t finish the sentence because no logical end to it occurs to him. He’s not too cold, he’s not too hungry or tired or uncomfortable. He’s content. He could stay here all night, listening to Shane breathe next to him. Kissing him some more, maybe. So he cannot be sure of the source of his impatience.

“Never have I ever,” Shane says, feeling his way delicately around the syllables, making nice with all the consonants and vowels, “hooked up with a _friend_ at a wedding.”

Neither of them drinks. Neither of them breathes, either.

Ryan wants to curl in on himself, to kick his feet and pound on the wood of the pier. He wants to throw his head back and yell up to the sky. The shock, the pure adrenaline of the sudden turn this night has taken, has punched right through the chill of his high.

Shane sits up, turned away from him. Embarrassed, maybe. Ryan doesn’t want him to be embarrassed, because he wasn’t wrong to say it. He wasn’t reading it wrong at all.

“Why, do you want to?” Ryan asks, and presses his fingernails into the palms of his hands, giddy and terrified.

*

They make the walk back up to the resort mostly in silence. They don’t touch, either. Shane’s got his hands in his pockets as he leads the way.

Ryan can see Shane very determinedly refusing to count any of his chickens, skeptical to the last. Every muscle in his body is poised for Ryan to change his mind. He’s preparing to be very casual and not at all disappointed, _no big deal, no hard feelings_, and it makes Ryan’s cheeks hurt where he’s biting into them.

Nobody sees them in the halls, and Shane lets them into his room, standing aside so Ryan can go in first. It’s a mirror image of his and Steven’s room, but with one king bed instead of two queens.

“Stop waiting for me to take it back,” Ryan blurts out as soon as Shane’s got the door closed and locked behind him. “I’m not gonna.”

He’s impatient for it, now that it’s real. Having been reminded how good kissing feels, he wants to do it again, and he wants to find out what _more_ feels like. In the way of impatient people he wants it _now_, while the pot is still working on him, making even ordinary sensations feel extraordinary.

Ryan pulls off his tie and tosses it aside.

Shane kicks off his shoes again. He shrugs his jacket off, throws it over a chair-back, and starts in on his own tie. “What are you up for?” he asks, but he’s still so guarded.

“I don’t know what’s on the table.”

Shane raises his eyebrows. He points at himself. “Again, Eagle Scout. Whatever you’re curious about, we can try.”

“I don’t know,” Ryan says honestly. He doesn’t even really know how to do this bit, the negotiation. With women it’s never been like ordering off a menu, it just _is_, and his body leads him to it as natural as breathing. He wants it to be like that, but he’s not entirely sure how guys move from the talking part to the doing part. “What would you do if I wasn’t me and you weren’t scared shitless right now?”

Shane narrows his eyes at him, but he doesn’t dispute it. “I’d kiss you again. I’d get you on the bed.”

“So do that.”

“I’d—” Shane starts, and he squeezes his eyes shut like whatever he’s seeing behind them, he almost can’t bear to imagine it. He wipes his palms on the front of his suit pants. When Ryan follows the movement with his eyes, he can tell that Shane’s hard.

“I want that,” Ryan says. “Whatever’s making you make that face. Whatever’s making you feel like that, I want it.”

And then Shane is advancing, convinced at last. He tugs Ryan’s jacket off his shoulders and down his arms, walking Ryan backward until the backs of his legs hit the bed and he goes tumbling down onto it. Shane crowds over him, kissing him now as feverishly and desperately as he had done slowly and carefully before, on the pier.

In the most basic sensory way it’s not what Ryan’s used to—his stubble against Ryan’s cheeks and chin and mouth, the hard press of him against Ryan’s hip, the sharp, masculine smell of his cologne—but in all the other ways, so much deeper and more fundamental, it’s just _Shane_.

Ryan had been so hungry for connection, so desperate for it, and now he’s got it in a million different ways, from a million different directions. He’d felt so solitary, and now Shane’s breath is hot in Ryan’s ear, his mouth on Ryan’s neck, his hands all over, and Ryan can’t even remember what loneliness feels like.

Every nerve in his body is positively singing; every inch of his skin glows bright where Shane’s fingers or his noises or his hot looks glance off it. They move together in slow motion for what feels like ages, but that’s probably just the pot again, playing with Ryan’s sense of time.

Clothes come off, to collect wrinkles in a heap on the floor.

*

Ryan wakes up the next morning to movement in the bed: Shane sliding carefully out of it, naked as the day he was born. He’s wobbly on his feet, like a fawn.

“Don’t run away,” Ryan says, his voice coming out a hoarse mess of a croak, entirely wrecked from the booze and the joint and other things, too.

Even though he’s seen it all now he still sneaks a peek, and feels himself blush when he gets below the waist.

“I was only going to shower,” Shane says, already defensive. “I was going to come back.”

This is it: the moment when they get to decide together if this is going to suck or not.

It hadn’t been uncomfortable last night, but in the harsh, sober light of day these things have a way of turning on a dime. It only takes a stray comment, a single rogue miscommunication, for something nice to go sour and shitty and be ruined.

It would be very like himself, Ryan thinks, to say the wrong thing right now; to be careless, or to spiral in agonizing self-doubt, or to interrogate what it all means until Shane shuts off entirely to avoid dealing with his mess. He doesn’t want to do any of that. They don’t have the luxury of fucking this up.

“Wanna conserve water?” Ryan asks, peeping out from under the covers.

The uncertainty on Shane’s face cracks into a reluctant smile.

“Yeah, okay,” he says. “We got a one-man EPA over here.”

“There’s a _drought_, Shane.”

Ryan gets out of bed, testing his limbs as he goes, stretching and cracking his neck. Shane goes to run the water and Ryan follows, sliding into the shower behind him and resolutely pretending that this is perfectly normal behavior for both of them.

Luckily it’s a big shower, with a tall showerhead that Shane can actually fit his noggin all the way under without ducking. Ryan knows, from years of complaints when they’re on the road shooting, that there’s no guarantee of that.

“How do you feel?” Shane asks him over the patter of the water. The water pressure in here isn’t bad.

“Like I understand now why people go to weddings alone,” he jokes.

Shane laughs, but he also skates his hands along Ryan’s sides, fingertips passing across his hipbone and then down and around to ghost along the curve of his ass. “No, I mean.”

“Oh.” Ryan reaches for the shampoo, pouring some into his hand to start scrubbing his scalp. As he does he runs down his body, trying to get past the pleasing heat of the water and Shane’s proximity to figure out how he feels.

Shane’s most of the way hard again, and Ryan’s getting there himself, and that’s—intriguing, and maybe even surprising. Although distracting.

He remembers the feel of Shane’s fingers in him, last night; gentle, and good, but the guy’s got a lot of finger and Ryan’s got a body that isn’t used to that. Still, he isn’t sore exactly. He’s just _reminded_, if he moves too quickly.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being reminded.

“I’m good,” Ryan says, and he hopes Shane will attribute the red of his face to the hot water. 

“Don’t get me wrong, last night was great,” Shane starts. Ryan can feel him gearing up to let Ryan down easy, to remind him what this was. Ryan doesn’t need the reminder. He’s a big boy. “Unexpected, but great. But we really can’t do this back in L.A.”

“Obviously,” Ryan sighs. Shane’s got a washcloth nice and wet and soapy, and he’s using it to soap up Ryan’s chest, his thighs, skipping right over where he wants the attention most. He winds the washcloth behind to get his back, his ass, and Ryan makes an impatient noise. “Come _on_, dude.”

“I guess there’s no harm,” Shane says, tossing the washcloth aside to drip dry. “This is vacation, after all.”

He pulls Ryan against him, between his thighs. With both his hands he pulls Ryan’s ass cheeks apart a little, brushing against him with a soapy fingertip, making Ryan shudder.

“Wow, diving right in, big guy. This how you always spend your vacations?”

Shane laughs. “More museums, usually.”

He brings his hand back around to grasp Ryan’s dick, perfectly slippery with soap. It’s easy for Ryan to do the same, to reach down and get a hand on him, and let instinct and excellent acoustics take over from there.

They’re going to need a second shower to clean up from their shower. So much for that drought.

*

Ryan sneaks back to his room wearing last night’s pants and shirt, jacket and tie draped over his arm.

Well, he doesn’t really _sneak_, because that would imply stealth. Steven’s wide awake—of course he is, it’s ten in the morning and he went to sleep like eleven hours ago—and waiting for him, looking up expectantly when Ryan walks in the door. Ryan had been a fool to hope for otherwise.

“Morning,” Ryan says, wary. He digs through his suitcase for fresh clothes for the day, jeans and a t-shirt. Andrew’s parents are throwing a lunch, he recalls, for anyone who’s sticking around for the rest of the weekend, but it’ll be casual.

When he comes out of the bathroom, Steven’s still sitting on the bed. He’s got his laptop open, which means he was probably working in spite of the holiday weekend.

“So did you go back with one of the women you were dancing with?” Steven asks.

“For someone with no sex life to speak of, you’re awfully nosy about everyone else’s.” 

“Sorry,” Steven says, his face falling, and Ryan knows he was too harsh. It’s not fair to talk guy talk with Steven one minute and punish him for it the next, not when he doesn’t have any intuition for the rhythm and rules of it.

“But no,” Ryan says. “I slept w—I slept in Shane’s room.”

“Oh,” Steven says. “Sorry if you were worried about waking me up. It would’ve been fine.”

“It was no problem.”

“Less interesting than a pretty cousin, though,” Steven says, trying his best. It doesn’t come naturally to him.

“Mmm,” Ryan says, noncommittal. “_More_ interesting, I think.”

“In what way?” Steven’s only half-paying attention, typing on his computer again, working on some email.

“In all ways,” Ryan says honestly. No offense intended to the beautiful cousins, all of whom Ryan is quite sure have names, although he can’t remember what they are just now. He’s sure they are also very interesting.

“That’s a nice thing to say,” Steven says absent-mindedly, still clacking away. “You should tell Shane you value his company. People like hearing that.”

“I’ll do that,” Ryan says.

*

There is indeed a lunch set up for whoever’s still around, paid for by the Ilnyckyjs and set up buffet-style in a private room in one of the resort’s restaurants. Ryan tags along with Steven, picking at cold cuts and making small talk with his ex-coworkers and looking at the door every three minutes like clockwork.

“What are you looking at?” Steven asks, twisting to look towards the door.

“Nothing.”

Shane does walk in eventually, and when he catches Ryan’s eye and ambles over Ryan’s insides go squirmy. It’s such a new way to feel around Shane that he almost mistakes it for nausea, for some unpleasant remnant of a night spent indulging in some light recreational substance abuse.

Shane steals a grape from Ryan’s plate and pops it in his mouth.

“Morning, fellas,” he says. “Everybody sleep well?”

“Like a baby,” Steven says. “The mattresses here are great.”

“I didn’t sleep much,” Ryan says, meeting Shane’s eye.

Shane winks at him and Ryan’s stomach twists again. “Kept you up, did I?”

“Yeah, you snore, big guy. You should get checked out for sleep apnea. If you die in your sleep while we’re filming for Unsolved I’m going to tell everyone a ghost smothered you, and then you’ll be dead _and_ wrong.”

“Can’t have that.”

Steven’s watching their back-and-forth with polite interest. “How was the end of the wedding? Adam said they were doing something with sparklers.”

“Very romantic,” Ryan says.

“Sparks definitely flew,” Shane agrees.

“Sorry I missed it,” Steven says, taking a serene bite of his turkey sandwich, cocking his head in puzzlement when they both start to laugh.

Ryan spends the rest of the lunch shifting in his seat like his whole body is itching. Every minute he spends around Shane in the presence of other people is sincerely annoying to him, only because now he knows how much more fun they could be having if they were alone.

Time is short, after all. Tomorrow morning they’ll be flying back to L.A., and then this little—_whatever it is_—will be done and dusted. And that’s fine with him, it is, but he still doesn’t see the logic in wasting that time sitting around.

Finally he can’t wait any longer.

“Wanna go back to your room?” he says, very low under his breath when Steven gets up to get a refill of iced tea.

Shane’s eyebrows go up in surprise. Then his face falls. He bites his lip. “I already checked out,” he says. “I’ve—my flight’s at four. I was planning to go back early and get a little work done tomorrow. I didn’t think you’d…well. I wasn’t expecting a reason to stay.”

Honestly, Ryan feels like the only person here who grasps the concept of Labor Day weekend. The whole point is to _not_ labor.

“Oh,” he says, trying not to wilt under the disappointment. “Well, that’s—fine.”

“I could change my flight,” Shane whispers wildly, or at least what passes for wildly for him. “I could get a new room. I’ll go to the front desk right now.”

Ryan knows the appropriate thing to say is _no, don’t worry about it_. _It was fun while it lasted, all good things must come to an end_, and blah blah blah. Shane should keep his flight.

What his mouth says instead, entirely without his permission, is, “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“They probably won’t have anything ready for a few hours,” Shane says. “Check-in’s not until three.”

“I’ll get Steven to talk a long walk or something.”

He doesn’t know if it’s the flurry of making plans or the fun of sneaking around, of sharing this secret, but it’s got his palms sweaty with anticipation. There are two spots of color high on Shane’s cheeks, making him look feverish, that say he feels the same. Shane stands back from the table in a rush even though his sandwich is only half-eaten, not bothering to push his chair in as he goes.

“Where’s he going in such a hurry?” Steven asks, watching Shane make a beeline for the door.

“Wasn’t feeling well,” Ryan says. “I think he’s going to try to move his flight so he can sleep it off.”

“He did look flushed,” Steven says, the very picture of concern. “I hope he’s not getting sick.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

Back in their room, Ryan tries his very best. He just hadn’t factored in the _Steven_ of it all. The man simply cannot take a hint, and Ryan cannot risk telling him the real reason he wants the room on the off-chance that it would give him a stroke.

“It’s a beautiful day out,” he says. Steven’s hunched over his computer again, back in the zone. “You should go enjoy the lake, it’s really pretty.”

“Kind of hot,” Steven says. “I’ve got a lot to get done here.”

Ryan tries a new angle. “It’s Labor Day weekend, man. You’re always talking about how bad burnout is in this industry. Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Steven sighs. “It’s not that easy. I’ve really got to get this done, or my whole week will be terrible. You know how it is.”

“Think of your_ mental health_, Steven. Think how improved your focus would be after a nice walk in the woods. All that—carbon dioxide. The quality of your work would skyrocket.”

“Oxygen,” Steven corrects. “Trees let off oxygen. If they let off carbon dioxide we’d all be dead.”

“Whatever,” Ryan says with an impatient wave of his hand. It’s not that he doesn’t _care_ about trees, broadly speaking; it’s just that in this moment he doesn’t give one single solitary fuck about trees unless they get Steven out of this hotel room in the next fifteen minutes so he can get laid.

“You know, that’s a good point,” Steven says. “Maybe I’ll go work on the balcony. Get some fresh air. Good idea, thanks, Ryan.”

Ryan’s hands form into frustrated fists at his sides. He stares at Steven, willing him to just _be cool_, to understand without making Ryan explain. In fairness to Steven, it is such a crazy thing, such an unlikely thing, that he could never be expected to intuit it.

“I could really use a nap, Steven,” Ryan says evenly, because he will not throw a tantrum like a child. “A nice, quiet, _private_ nap.”

Maybe Steven will just think he wants to jerk off. That would be fine. Ryan could live with that.

“You won’t even know I’m out there,” Steven says with a smile. He reaches down to unplug his laptop and carries it out with him to the balcony. At the glass door he puts his finger to his lips, _shhh_, and gives Ryan a thumbs-up.

Ryan could scream.

His phone pings with a text. He looks down at it, hoping for good news—early check-in, perhaps. Maybe just a room number, which would be very sexy and mysterious.

It is a text from Shane, but the news isn’t good: _There’s no room at the inn ☹_

_What do u mean, _Ryan texts back.

_I mean they’re sold out for the holiday weekend. Booked solid. Even the suites, I checked. _

The idea that Shane had been willing to part with a frankly obscene amount of money for a suite just to spend another night with him gives Ryan that wobbly, top-of-the-roller-coaster, bottom-dropping-out-from-under-him feeling again.

Christ, they just need a _bed_. Failing that, a door with a lock. Ryan’s not picky.

He sits there, racking his brain for another option. Maybe there’s someone other than Steven he could ask, someone who would understand? Or—Tahoe’s a big vacation spot, there are lots of properties here, lots of resorts and hotels. Maybe one of them has availability. Or they could rent a car with a big backseat, _or_…

He’s still desperately trying to come up with a solution twenty minutes later when he gets another text from Shane.

_Ha ha. Well. Funny story._

_whats up_

_I got us a room, but it’s weird. Get in the elevator, top floor. Turn right and follow the hallway to the end. Don’t let anybody see you. _

A chill runs up Ryan’s spine, reading it. Maybe it’s the anticipation, but there really is something to the sneaking around. It reminds him of the way he felt last summer, when Watcher was just a hope, just a huge secret he, Shane, and Steven kept close, just for themselves. Having such a secret had been agonizingly stressful, but it was also _thrilling_.

He slips out of the room. Steven, out on the balcony, doesn’t even look up from his computer to notice him go.

*

“It’s the fucking _honeymoon suite_?”

Shane chuckles uneasily. Ryan looks over at the bed, which is massive. There are red rose petals strewn all over the lily-white bedspread. There’s a champagne bottle sweating in an ice bucket on the table.

“It really is a funny story. You’ll laugh.”

“Shane, our _friends_ are staying in the honeymoon suite. Because they just got married.”

“They’re not,” he says. “Not staying here, I mean. Not tonight. I was asking about a room, I’d just been told they were sold out, and then I ran into Andrew and Thespi at the registration desk. They’d been planning to check out a night early and get a head start on the real honeymoon, and when Andrew heard about my plight he gave me their room key.”

Ryan opens his mouth, ready to protest. It’s weird. It’s _too_ weird. Then he shuts it again, because he’d wanted a bed and a door, and now he’s got both. More bed and more door than any two people need, really.

“But,” he says weakly. He looks at the bed again. At the fucking rose petals.

“Housekeeping was just leaving when I came up, they turned over the whole room,” Shane says. “Fresh sheets, _silk_, by the way. Fresh towels. You should see the Jacuzzi tub.”

“Do the jets work, d’you think?”

Shane smiles at the callback, remembering too. “You know, a swanky joint like this, I bet they do.”

God, it feels like a different life. Ryan feels like a different person than the guy who sat in his trunks in a Jacuzzi tub in New Orleans, feeling unbearably awkward when Shane’s bare shin brushed against his own.

“We should test them out, just to make sure.”

“We can do that.” Shane shakes his head. “Boy, if that guy could see me now.”

“Just let me get my swim trunks.” Ryan pretends to head for the door. Shane reels him back in with a laugh, kisses him bruisingly hard in punishment for being a smartass.

Shane gets as many of the petals off the bed as he can with two sweeps of his long arms, and there’s Ryan’s afternoon sorted.

*

They stay in bed all day, napping and fooling around and napping some more.

When they finally come up for air it’s past dinnertime. Ryan has a couple of texts on his phone from Steven that he intends to continue ignoring until Steven sends out an actual search party.

Ryan feels like it’s a glimpse at what a honeymoon would feel like, a real one. He’s hungry but he doesn’t want to leave the room, doesn’t even want to leave the bed. He just wants to stay here in this bubble they’ve made for themselves and feel new feelings until his back or his heart give out, whichever comes first.

“Room service?” Shane asks. There’s a fancy-looking menu on the table next to the now-empty bottle of champagne.

“Mmm,” Ryan agrees, because then there’s some chance he won’t have to get out of bed after all.

“What do you want?”

Ryan thinks for a minute. He’s starving, anything would be good, but there’s something so satisfyingly primal about a big slab of meat. “Steak,” he says. “Medium rare. Wouldn’t say no to a glass of wine.”

“Hedonist,” Shane says. “Dessert?”

“Surprise me.”

Shane gets on the phone to place the order. Ryan must doze again, because the next thing he hears is a rap on the door, and Shane swearing as he grabs a bathrobe from the closet to answer it.

Shane tosses a robe to Ryan, too, and he sleepily slips it on. Ryan gets a good look at himself in the mirror: hair a wreck, neck littered with little bruises and love bites. He’d better start thinking up a good lie, or else pull a Shane and start wearing turtlenecks in September.

Then again, maybe the marks will disappear tomorrow as if by magic the moment he gets on the plane for home, like Cinderella’s carriage turning back into a pumpkin at midnight.

“Good evening, Mr. Ilnyckyj,” the waiter says to Shane. “May I come in?” He’s in a suit and tie, and Ryan seems to recall a note with the champagne, something about the room having butler service. Pretty posh.

Shane stands aside and the guy rolls their tray in. “Two steaks, medium rare, with potatoes_ au gratin_ and grilled asparagus.”

Ryan opens his mouth to protest, but Shane doesn’t let him. “Ryan, if you don’t eat a vegetable one of these days you’re going to get scurvy and all your teeth will fall out. It’s in season. Shut up and eat it.”

“What are you, my dad? It tastes bitter,” Ryan says. “No offense,” he says to the butler, even though he knows the guy didn’t make it.

The guy chuckles. “Always an honor to witness the first marital squabble.”

Ryan freezes, and Shane freezes. Of course the dude thinks they are the Ilnyckyjs, of _course_ he thinks they’re newlyweds. They’re in the honeymoon suite. Andrew’s name is on the reservation, and also on signs all over the resort: _Welcome, Ilnyckyj wedding!_

Ryan rather regrets the _dad_ comment, but it’s too late for take-backsies. The guy’s just gonna have to think whatever he thinks.

“The wedding was over twenty-four hours ago,” Shane says. “If you think _this_ was our first marital fight, you are dreaming.”

He grins at Ryan, a small private smile just for him, off-kilter and playful. So that’s how they’re gonna play it.

“Only because you tried to make us late to our own reception.”

“What were they going to do, start without us?”

The butler watches them bicker for a moment, polite, and then he unveils the third tray. “And a little something special from the chef, to celebrate. On the house.”

There’s more champagne, and a fancy chocolate lava cake with ice cream, and some strawberries with more chocolate for dipping. It’s all very—very _honeymoon suite_, and Ryan feels the tips of his ears go red. He’s not sure why this should embarrass him, of all things. Maybe it’s the cheesiness of it, the cliché. He can feel Shane judging, and Ryan along with it.

“It looks awesome, thank you,” Shane says, and he tips the guy generously and ushers him out the door. He comes back chuckling.

“Your dinner, Mr. Ilnyckyj.” Ryan hands him a plate.

“Your silverware, Mr. Ilnyckyj,” Shane says in return, passing him silverware rolled up in an ivory cloth napkin, and Ryan rolls his eyes. He also says a silent prayer that Andrew never finds out about any of this.

“Isn’t Andrew going to ask questions when he sees room service for two on his final bill?”

Shane shakes his head. “I’ll pay him back for the food and the room and then some, but Andrew’s not really the type to ask questions. It’s not a politeness thing, either. He just doesn’t care.”

That does scan with what Ryan knows of Andrew, who is himself so fastidiously private that Ryan didn’t even know he was dating someone at the office for like two years. In terms of accidental co-conspirators, they could do a lot worse.

They dive into dinner. As they eat, Shane gestures around at the room, at all of it: the rose petals and the champagne and the robes they’re wearing. The silk sheets and chocolate-covered strawberries. “You really want all this, man?”

Ryan thinks he knows what Shane is asking, and he’d sort of expected it, but that doesn’t mean he needs to make it easy for him. “All what?”

“You know. The whole—_to-do_. All the wedding stuff. The trappings. You want this for real?”

“What, you’re not having fun?”

Shane shrugs. “Sure, when it’s just a _bit_. It’s a lot, though, isn’t it? Kind of silly?”

“I can take or leave the rose petals,” Ryan says. “It’s not about the accessories, dude. It’s not about ticking all the boxes of what a wedding’s supposed to have. It’s about getting up in front of all your friends and family and choosing somebody, loudly and publicly, _forever_.”

Shane makes a little disbelieving noise. “Forever’s a long time.”

“Yeah, that’s why you do it.” Ryan thinks they might as well be speaking different languages. He knows Shane can be a little dense on the feelings front, but he still can’t believe he has to spell this out. “If it was easy it wouldn’t mean shit.”

“You should let me borrow those rose-colored glasses sometime.”

“You really think you wouldn’t?” Ryan asks. “If someone you loved more than life itself wanted to get married, you’d still put your foot down?”

He doesn’t believe it for a second. He knows Shane. Shane does this sometimes, makes a big show of his principles, but Ryan’s seen him step back from an awful lot in the interest of preserving the peace. Ryan’s won plenty of dumb fights with the guy over the years that he would have lost to a more stubborn person, to a person who cared less about the happiness of others.

“I guess I probably would,” Shane admits, and Ryan feels vindicated. “And I hope you get all this for real, if it’s what you want. I’m sure you will.”

“I’m glad one of us is sure.” Ryan frowns. He’s been enjoying himself, and he hadn’t really wanted to get into this again. He’d felt so dejected last night, and he doesn’t want to feel that way now.

Shane looks at him, right in the eye, considering him.

“Shut up,” he says finally, his voice sort of rough, almost _mad_, and that isn’t what Ryan had been expecting at all. “Cut it out with the pity party. You don’t even _know_, you don’t even see yourself. Anybody should be so lucky if you wanted to stand with them in front of a room full of people and say dumb sappy shit and shove cake in their face.”

“You think?”

“Ryan, I’m so certain that I’ll make you a gentleman’s agreement right now. If ten years from today you’re not married, I’ll marry you myself, in front of god and the witnesses of your choosing. You can enter your forties a married man.”

Ryan throws his head back and laughs. At some point, though, he realizes Shane’s _not_ laughing. He stops.

Shane’s just looking at him, arms crossed, unimpressed. In Ryan’s defense, it had really sounded like a joke.

“You’re fucking with me, right?”

Shane shakes his head. “I’m not. We’ll do one of those pact things. If we’re both single ten years from now, and if you still want to get married, I’ll marry the absolute shit out of you.”

Ryan considers the proposition. On the one hand, it’s patently ludicrous. On the other hand, it makes a certain kind of sense. They already spend all their time together. They enjoy each other's company. The only missing piece had been the hurdle they cleared with notable alacrity this weekend.

“You _just_ got done telling me you think marriage is a garbage institution for garbage people,” Ryan points out.

“I’m pretty confident you’re going to find someone loads better to marry for real and I’m not gonna get called up to bat,” Shane says. “But if it’s my intentions you doubt, don’t.”

Then Shane removes his napkin from his lap with a dramatic flourish. He goes down on one knee, looking up at Ryan, beseeching. Hands clasped in front of him like a real fuckin’ doofus.

Ryan’s lost all feeling in his face.

“Ryan Steven Bergara,” Shane begins with grave seriousness. “I read somewhere once that you have to use the person’s middle name when you propose, which is really stupid, just like everything about wedding culture. But there you go.”

“This proposal sucks,” Ryan says. “Assuming that’s what is happening right now.”

“Shh,” Shane says firmly. “Shush. I’m not done. Ryan, you’re a dope person and I like you, and if you want to be married you deserve to be. We’d fight constantly over everything, but we do that already. Will you make your mother the most confused woman in the world and marry me, if you don’t find someone you like better in the next ten years?”

Ryan sighs. He’s confused, because Shane’s words are teasing but Shane’s eyes are brown and lovely and serious. He’s still not clear whether this is a bit or not—or whether, even if it _is_ a bit, Shane might not still mean it.

“Where’s my ring?” he asks, stalling for time.

Shane looks around. He grabs the straw that came with his water goblet and tears one end of the wrapper, blowing on the straw so the wrapper comes flying clean off.

“Hand,” he says, beckoning impatiently. Just because he has to see if Shane will follow through with this, because it’s _so_ stupid, it’s _so_ ridiculous, Ryan puts out his left hand.

Shane carefully ties the straw wrapper around his ring finger, tearing off the excess bits at either end.

“Wow,” Ryan says. “You’re such an idiot. Yeah, I guess I’ll marry you in a decade if it turns out no one else is brave enough to deal with me.”

Shane beams at him, getting up off his knee with a creak and a grimace that says his joints are already too old for this business.

“Good,” he says. “It’s settled. Now come here and give me a kiss to seal the deal, Mr. Ilnyckyj.”

“Gross,” Ryan says, laughing, and Shane makes a face too. But Ryan still goes.

*

Shane wakes him up the next morning with a sloppy morning breath kiss that _should_ be very offensive.

“Honeymoon’s over, pal,” he says. “Check-out’s in an hour.”

Ryan pulls the covers over his head. “Five more minutes.”

“No. You’ve got to get back down to your room and explain to Steven why you never came back last night, if you’re not dead. Which is what he thinks you are, considering the way your phone is blowing up.”

Ryan checks his phone. He does, in fact, have about ten texts from Steven, ranging from polite (yesterday, dinnertime) to concerned (last night, ten pm) to decidedly brusque (this morning). He’s got texts from other people, too, and there’s nothing like a concerned “Are you okay?” text from _Rie_ to make a guy feel like trash.

“Maybe I’ll tell him I just flew home early.”

“Without any of your stuff? Without your laptop?”

Shane’s got him there. Ryan would never leave his laptop. He’s a little anxious just being this far away from it for so many hours in a row, or he would be if he wasn’t floating along on a river of dopamine and oxytocin and a dozen other happy-making chemicals whose names he can’t pronounce.

“Ugh, fine. Don’t wanna leave.”

“Well, you have to,” Shane says. “Unless…” and then he trails off delicately.

“Unless what?”

“I’ve been thinking I might…I don’t know. Cancel my flight. Rent a car and drive home instead. The drive from here to L.A. isn’t bad, seven or eight hours tops, and it cuts right through about four national parks. I could be back by Wednesday and still have a little time for sightseeing.”

Ryan sits upright, letting the covers fall to his waist. Shane stares at him, not even bothering to hide it.

“But you can’t drive eight hours by yourself,” Ryan says. “You’re such a shitty driver, Shane. You’ll get road-rage murdered for going sixty-eight in the left lane. You’ll get lost and wind up in Tucson.”

There’s a reason Shane doesn’t drive in L.A. or when they film, which is that he sucks at it.

“Yeah, probably,” Shane says. “You’d better come with me, for the good of the company, or else you’ll be down a co-founder.”

“I’m sure Steven will also see it that way,” Ryan says, but he’s already decided to do it.

He’s never been able to quit anything cold turkey. He needs to ease back into his real life, to ease away from _this_, or the withdrawal will be a killer. Maybe if he stores up enough _touch_, enough _closeness_, he can hibernate with it until spring comes.

*

Talking to Steven is hard. Ryan can’t lie to him—he never could—so in the end he decides not to. He doesn’t try to explain, either; he simply throws himself at Steven’s mercy and hopes for the best.

“Where were you?” Steven explodes at him when he gets back to their room. “Half of BuzzFeed Video is crawling the grounds looking for your waterlogged corpse. I was going to inform hotel security if you weren’t back by check-out.”

“I’m sorry,” Ryan says, “I wasn’t by my phone,” and that’s true enough.

“What the hell, man?” Steven must have been really worried. He doesn’t throw around _hells_ often or easily.

“Shane got another room.”

“Well, a heads-up would have been great,” Steven says, looking deflated and confused and _fully_ aware Ryan’s excuse is not sufficient.

“I know. I’m sorry. Hey, uh, while I’m apologizing for stuff—Shane and I need a couple of extra days off. We’ll be back in the office Wednesday, or Thursday at the absolute latest. There’s something we’ve got to see to.”

Steven narrows his eyes at Ryan. “What kind of something?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Ryan says, as evenly as he can. “You probably don’t want to know. We need a little time, okay? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

Steven looks at him a long time, hands thrust in the pockets of his jeans. Ryan can see the cogs working, can see him trying to decide whether to push or not. Weighing whether that’s good enough for him to take on trust.

“Is everybody okay?” he asks, finally, because he’s _Steven_, and he’s got his priorities as firmly in order as his life. He’s one of the few people Ryan’s ever met who lives primarily in service of others, wondering always what he can do, how he can ease the path.

“Everyone’s okay,” Ryan confirms. “I just have to.”

“How can I help?”

“You can keep things running at work, and say it’s fine if we don’t check our emails until Wednesday, and not ask any questions.”

Steven’s eyes are wide now, concerned. Ryan wonders if he suspects. Steven’s naïve, but he’s not dumb. Fortunately for all of them he’s also unfailingly polite; he would never, ever bring it up, even if he was sure.

“Done,” he says, and his eyes flick down to Ryan’s neck and back up, and still he doesn’t pry. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Ryan shrugs, because he rarely does. He just feels that tug inside himself that says this is important. He’s made a whole-ass hobby out of doubting his instincts and his intuition, of second- and third-guessing himself into knots, and this time he isn’t going to do it.

*

They rent a car, a reliable little Honda Civic, and they pile their weekender bags in the trunk and drive south.

Well, _Ryan_ drives south. Shane fusses over a fold-out paper map he bought at the Hertz rental car office, drawing a route in marker and cursing when the movement of the car makes his line shaky.

“You know GPS works great here, right?” Ryan asks. Sometimes he thinks Shane has some romantic notions of the west that are tied up in his romantic notions about nature in general. It must be a consequence of being from somewhere very flat and hideous.

“There’s nothing like a real map for a road trip,” Shane tells him, but he switches over to fussing with the music once they hit the 395. Ryan’s expecting some wobbly-voiced warbling hipster band with a baffling name that he’s never heard of, but instead he picks a classic road trip playlist: Springsteen and The Cars and Fleetwood Mac, stuff to make your heart soar when you roll the windows down.

“Nice,” Ryan says as some primo ‘70s Americana bullshit kicks on, Tom Petty or John Mellencamp or something, the one about running down a dream and going wherever it leads. The breeze ruffles Shane’s hair and the sleeve of his shirt where he’s got his elbow rested on the door, hand up to grasp the top of the window frame like a real cool guy.

“If you like that kind of thing,” Shane says, but he’s grinning behind his sunglasses. “A little on the nose for me.”

Ryan’s not sure they’ve ever been in a car together without somewhere to be imminently. They’ve spent hours and hours in cars together, over the years; driving from this airport to that hotel, venturing out into the sleepier towns the country has to offer, hoping to awaken something better left sleeping. Ryan knows Shane’s profile better than anyone else’s in the entire world, so often has he looked over at him from the driver’s seat.

Still, it feels different this way, with unencumbered hours and days stretching out in front of them. And it feels different because Ryan’s seen Shane come apart under him and above him, and he knows he’ll see it again tonight, too, wherever their road ends.

“Where are we going?” Ryan asks, even though he doesn’t much care.

“We can make Yosemite by two. I just want to drive up to Glacier Point, see some views, maybe do a really easy hike. We’ll find you a cheeseburger bigger than your head well before nightfall, I assure you.”

“This is it,” Ryan says with a sigh. “The day I get eaten by a bear. We all knew it was coming.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have pictured you with a bear, but he’s gonna have to share.”

Shane whistles along with the song, staring out the window until Ryan gets the joke a few seconds later. “Jesus, Shane.”

“Sure, him too.” He opens his mouth for Ryan to throw a gummy bear into it.

Ryan’s been to Yosemite, but not since he was a teenager. There was a summer when he was about fourteen when his dad became suddenly obsessed with taking him and Jake to all the national parks in California. There were a lot of them, and by July they’d all blurred together into indistinct Scenery: a big mountain, a big tree, and blue sky, and his dad with the camera hustling them into the shot.

Shane sees it differently, and watching Shane see it changes how Ryan sees it too. Or maybe that’s just the difference being an adult makes, and finally having enough perspective to look at something so big and imagine your place in it.

“Look at all that, Ryan!”

“It’s beautiful,” Ryan agrees. He can hear the rumble of the falls in the distance, louder still when he closes his eyes and lets his hearing take over.

“It makes you see why some people think it was designed, doesn’t it?” Shane asks. “Something this perfect.”

Ryan thinks they might be talking about god now, which Shane _never_ does, he doesn’t believe in any of that stuff. He supposes this is as close as the guy comes to church. For a moment he regrets that Steven’s not here to see the look on Shane’s face too, awed and reverent, and he takes his phone out and he takes a quick covert picture.

“I saw that,” Shane says, but he doesn’t fuss or ask to see the picture. If anything he’s just a little perturbed to have been reminded of the existence of modern technology at all.

“Sorry, let me just get my tintype camera set up. I bet you’d look good in daguerreotype.”

“Is that a line?” Shane asks, waggling his eyebrows behind his sunglasses. “Honestly, it’s kind of working. Talk antique photography to me, baby.”

“Maybe later,” Ryan says, laughing, and then he forces himself to be quiet for a while so Shane can enjoy the little communing-with-nature moment he’s got going on.

They take a walk, one of the easier hikes, and they don’t say much. Eventually they start to lose the sun behind a mountain, and Ryan’s stomach growls so loudly that Shane jumps, and they head back to the car in search of food and a bed.

“Too tired?” Shane asks him much later, much later, poking him in the side and leaning in close to get his nose in the crook of Ryan’s neck.

“No way,” Ryan says. He thinks he’ll never be too tired again, not for this. And for someone for whom tired is practically a personality trait at this point, a piece of him so fundamental he thought he’d never shake it, that’s something.

*

He wakes up clear-eyed the next day, before his alarm without even trying. After a hotel breakfast buffet that’s somehow satisfying in its various disappointments—cold eggs, stale bagels, too-sugary cereals, but so _much_ of all of it that it almost does a full loop back around to good—they hit the road again.

Today the music’s different again, old folky stuff Ryan recognizes mixed with newer stuff he doesn’t, and some songs with a twang that could pass for bluegrass. Another day he might protest, but the clear earnest voices suit the clearness of the sky, and Shane’s face is so serene he can’t stop looking over at it.

“You are too romantic,” Ryan says, apropos of nothing. “You talk a big game, you pretend to be so relentlessly practical, but look at you. If you could, you’d marry a scenic vista.” 

Shane’s eyes are closed, his face upturned to find the sun. “I’d rather have this than a wedding,” he says, and Ryan’s not sure if he’s agreeing or not. 

“It doesn’t have to be either-or,” Ryan says.

“I guess not.”

They spend the morning in the car and they pull off in Three Rivers, home to the entrance to Sequoia National Park.

“Get ready to see some big trees, Ryan!”

“I see one big tree in particular all the time,” Ryan says.

“Now I’ll get to experience what you must feel like next to regular-sized trees,” Shane says, giving it right back. “It’s rare I get to feel tiny and insignificant.”

They find General Sherman and they spend a good long time staring up at it. Ryan’s from around here, he knows trees can get big, but still: that’s a big-ass tree.

“That’s a big-ass tree,” he says finally, rendering his verdict, and Shane laughs at him.

“You’re a real poet,” he says. “Truly one of the greats when it comes to putting voice to the indescribable majesty of the natural world. It’s you and Wordsworth and Thoreau.”

“Thoreau’s mom did his laundry.” It’s one of the only facts Ryan knows about the guy, picked up from a girlfriend who majored in English lit in college.

“You and Wordsworth, then. We’ve just got to stop filming bullshit videos about ghosts and our top five favorite chips long enough for you to write the next _Tintern Abbey_.”

Ryan frowns, impatient the way he gets when Shane references something he should probably have learned in high school but didn’t because he was too busy watching Lakers highlights in study hall.

“Look, I write what I know, and I know that’s a big-ass tree.”

Shane knows his way around here pretty well, pointing out some of his favorite trees—of course he has _favorite trees_—and Ryan’s starting to think he knows where Shane goes some weekends when he just drops off the map, no texts and no Tweets and no Instagram posts.

Before long he ushers Ryan back to the car.

“Eager to get home?” Ryan asks, and he hopes the answer’s no. They could be home before dark if they left now, even if they stop for dinner, but he doesn’t want to be. They exist so perfectly together on the road, with no expectations and no consequences and no definitions, and in L.A. it can’t be that way.

“Not quite,” Shane says. “It’s kind of a drive, actually. Do you mind?”

Ryan doesn’t mind. If Shane suggested they drive to Maine right now, he’d put more gas in the car and hit the highway and he wouldn’t look back until they hit prairie.

They stop for tacos in Bakersfield, which in Ryan’s opinion is the only legitimate reason to ever go to Bakersfield. They also find a Target and Shane runs in alone, coming out fifteen minutes later with a couple of bags that look suspiciously heavier than anything Ryan’s imagination can come up with for what might be in them.

And then they drive, and drive, and drive. Shane puts on some moody instrumental playlist, chosen specifically for Ryan this time, movie scores with weird ambient notes by obscure Scandinavian composers.

They drive east, and then north again, and with every mile they drive in the opposite direction from Los Angeles Ryan’s heart gets a little lighter. Shane falls asleep somewhere after they cross back over the 395, but it doesn’t matter; Ryan saw the signs for Death Valley and didn’t need Shane to tell him to turn.

He wakes Shane up at the entrance to the park, about nine o’clock. “Sorry, I didn’t know where from here.”

“I want to get high,” Shane says, grinning when Ryan snickers. “High up, smartass. There’s a place called Aguereberry Point. Turnoff should be in about half an hour, it’s a dirt road. I think I’ll recognize it.”

“Great, so we’re going to be eaten by _coyotes_,” Ryan says, but he still makes the turnoff when Shane points it out. Then they drive for a while on a road Ryan’s quite certain should not be navigated for the first time in the dark, and not by a Honda Civic.

Finally they arrive at the peak, and it’s all but pitch black.

“Uh,” Ryan says, because surely the point of a prominent vista is to actually _see_ the vista.

“Have a little faith,” Shane says, and he grabs the bag from the backseat and gets out of the car, and Ryan thinks: _oh my god, I’m about to get nailed at six thousand feet while coyotes watch._

Shane must see the look on his face, because he cracks up. “Calm down, buddy.”

He reaches in the bag and hands Ryan a pair of binoculars.

“Oh,” Ryan says. He’s not sure if he’s disappointed or relieved.

“In another hour this is going to be the biggest, darkest sky in the United States,” Shane says. He squints into the deep purple almost-dark to orient himself. “Las Vegas is less than two hundred miles that way, and L.A. is two hundred and fifty miles behind us. Two of the brightest cities in the world, and sandwiched in the middle, there’s all of this.”

He spreads his arms wide, encompassing the whole scope of the growing dark around them.

“I’ve never been here at night,” Ryan says. He likes it. It feels _wild_. It feels like they could be the only two people in the whole world; like the rest of the population could be Thanos-snapped out of existence and he wouldn’t know or care.

“It’s something else,” Shane says. “You can look up and see exactly what people would have seen thousands of years ago. Doesn’t that make you feel—I don’t know—_something_?”

“All I _do_ is feel things,” Ryan says a little helplessly, and Shane just looks at him like it’s not like that for him.

They don’t have a blanket or anything, and the ground is hard rock, so they lie on the hood of the car once the engine cools and wait for true dark to come down over them like a cloak. It does find them before long, and Shane was right after all: it’s remarkable, it’s dark like Ryan’s never seen dark, stars like he’s never seen stars.

It’s not the first new thing he’s experienced in the last few days, but it is the biggest.

“But only barely,” Ryan tells Shane, because he can’t resist.

Shane sighs fondly. “Ryan, can you please stop making dick jokes for five minutes and just lie there and enjoy this fucking miracle of the universe that I’m showing you?”

Ryan can try. He goes quiet for a while, trading off with Shane for the binoculars, letting Shane ramble to him about this constellation or that star cluster. Shane seems like a guy who spent a lot of time in planetariums growing up, while Ryan was spending time on basketball courts.

“What are you looking for?” Ryan asks when he can’t stay quiet any more.

“Cygnus. The swan.”

“No,” Ryan repeats. “I mean. What are you _looking_ for?”

The big mountains, the big trees, the big sky. For the last two days, Ryan’s spent this road trip watching Shane casting about for something, looking for answers in the places he’s deemed them most likely to be hiding.

Shane doesn’t say anything for a long time. If it weren’t for the binoculars held up to his eyes, Ryan might wonder if he fell asleep.

“Somewhere to put it all,” he says, finally. “Somewhere worthy of it.”

“It?”

“Yes,” Shane says, but he doesn’t elaborate.

Ryan doesn’t know if he’s supposed to know what _it_ is, or if he’s allowed to ask, so he doesn’t. But the next time Shane hands the binoculars back he wipes the nose pad off first, as if Ryan won’t feel the dampness there.

“Did you really mean it?” Ryan asks. “The pact thing. Ten years, if we’re not—if we’re. Was that real?”

Shane shrugs. He points ahead of them, out into the darkness. “I told you, Vegas is two hundred miles that way,” he says, and it’s too cryptic for Ryan to make sense of: just another mystery in a sky full of them. 

They lie there for maybe another half an hour, maybe longer, maybe less. Time doesn’t really have much of a say here; it’s yielded the floor to _place._

Finally Shane sits up, scooting off the hood of the rental car that Ryan’s going to wish he splurged for the extra insurance on, before it’s all said and done.

“Let’s find a hotel,” he says. “There’s a lodge not far from here.”

“So did you find the place?” Ryan asks. “Somewhere to put it?”

“Inconclusive,” Shane says, squinting up at the night sky one last time. “Time will tell.”

Ryan has thoughts.

*

“Not really what I meant when I was talking about putting things places,” Shane says back at the hotel, when Ryan asks Shane to fuck him.

But his hand on Ryan’s forearm is shaking, and Ryan thinks it might be in the general realm of what he meant, in some broader metaphorical sense at the very least.

“Do we need it?” Ryan asks when Shane tosses a condom on the bed, the contents of the other Target bag having revealed themselves to him at last.

Shane cups his face. “You’re so stupid,” he says fondly. “It’s going to get you in so much trouble. You can’t pull this shit in L.A., okay?”

“What, they don’t have STDs in Death Valley?” Ryan asks. “Is it because we’re below sea lev—”

Shane cuts him off with a kiss so firm and comprehensive it almost hurts.

“Shut up,” he says, and Ryan wonders if he’s ever going to be able to hear Shane say that ever again without wanting to scramble out of his pants.

*

Ryan’s not sure how women do it; how they make room inside themselves for someone else, how they share that essential space with another person like it’s no big deal.

Maybe you get used to it. Then again, he thinks, maybe you don’t _ever_ get used to it. Maybe it feels like opening up your chest and inviting someone to reach in and grab your heart and squeeze, every single time.

He’d expected to feel it; he’d known, from Shane’s hands, from Shane’s mouth, what to expect in that way. But he hadn’t known he would feel it _everywhere_, in the skin between his fingers where they’re spread across the hot skin of Shane’s chest and shoulder, and at the corners of his lips, and in the heels of his feet where they’re dug into Shane’s hips.

Shane keeps telling him to breathe, which is ludicrous, because it’s all Ryan can do. The room is filled with the sound of his breathing, ragged and bewildered.

It’s not even that it hurts, because it doesn’t hurt. Shane’s too careful for that, too methodical and frankly too good a lay.

It feels great, in fact, _revelatory_, which is too bad, because Ryan’s pretty sure he can never do it again. Not with someone else. He’s too self-conscious, too afraid of whatever Shane will be able to see now that he’s open. Now that Shane’s in him.

But at least Shane’s already seen Ryan at his very best and at his very worst, and at every point between the two extremes. Whatever he finds in Ryan now, he won’t be surprised. With a stranger, though, someone else: it’s unthinkable.

Possibly Ryan’s just not very good at sharing.

He says this to Shane, when he can make words, and Shane kisses every knuckle on his right hand. “Give it a minute,” he says. Right when Ryan’s about to say that he _can’t_, he can’t bear it, Shane starts to move.

He starts to move, and Ryan understands that he was wrong after all. He’s not the one who’s flayed open, or at least he’s not the only one. Shane is open too, and it’s not at all clear who is giving and who is taking.

Ryan looks at Shane’s face, at his crinkled eyes and the clench of his jaw and the crooked crunch of his smile, and the riddle unravels before him. He understands what _it_ is, the thing that Shane’s so desperate to keep locked up safe; and about their stupid pact; and why it’s so cruel that tomorrow they’re meant to snap back into their real lives as if the last five days never happened.

When he finds it in Shane, he’s not surprised. It was there the whole time, waiting for it to occur to him to look.

“I’m gonna come,” Shane mutters, snaking a hand between their bodies, and as soon as he does Ryan realizes it’s true of himself too. That _does_ surprise him, because it’s never snuck up on him like this before, with all the building tension and cathartic release of a jump scare.

But Ryan’s the Final Girl and he’s opened the door at the end of the corridor, the one the audience was _screaming_ at him not to open but secretly hoped he would. Now all he can do is clutch at Shane’s ribs for dear life and roll _hard_ from the rising action into the climax, coming into Shane’s fist, his hips finally loose enough for Shane to bury himself deep with a hoarse gasp as he comes too.

“Is it always like that?” he asks, when he thinks he can trust the words coming out of his mouth.

“No,” Shane says, voice muffled where his mouth’s pressed into Ryan’s hair. “No, it’s not.”

*

Later, as they’re falling asleep, Shane nudges him with his foot.

“So do you think you’ll date guys now?”

“Why, are you jealous?” Ryan asks. He means to be light, to be joking, but he doesn’t quite get it there, and he regrets saying it.

“Mmm. Desperately,” Shane says.

“Probably not.”

“Why not? You could double your dating pool in one fell swoop.”

There are at least three reasons.

One: Ryan can count on one hand the number of guys, real in-the-flesh guys, who he’s looked at and wanted like this. It seems like a lot of work to root them out of the embarrassing Silver Lake bars where they probably live.

Two: He’s not sure he has the stomach for it, for upending his life if he doesn’t have to. He might go to such lengths if it was necessary, if he couldn’t live without it, but he’s not sure why he’d go out of his way otherwise. It’s like acquiring a new mildly self-destructive habit for no good reason; like making yourself drink coffee or beer until you _need_ it, when before you were perfectly content without.

Three: because it would not be this, and Ryan would always compare it. That’s not fair to anyone.

Ryan’s not sure which of these three reasons is the right one for Shane to hear.

“I just think it would be hard,” is what he goes with, and it’s vague enough to encompass all of them, with the additional benefit of being true. “And my life is already complicated and very public.”

He wonders if this is the coward’s answer, the easy way out, but Shane wraps an arm around his waist and slides a foot between his shins and it eases the sting of his own weakness a bit.

*

In the morning they take their time. Ryan’s all out of clean clothes and he knows his inbox must be a mess, but still he dawdles over his shower and his diner eggs.

They’d planned to be back in L.A. by noon, but it’s looking more like two or three by the time they finally pull onto the interstate. Shane texts Steven a heads-up that they won’t be in the office until tomorrow, and his phone buzzes immediately with a reply.

“He just says ‘_have fun, be careful, respect yourself and others_.’”

“Feels like judgment.”

“I don’t think so,” Shane says. “I think he genuinely wants us to respect ourselves and others. Not a bad way to live.”

“He knows,” Ryan says, and he’s troubled. The whole point of this circuitous trip home was to get this out of his system, so he wouldn’t bring the wanting home with him. He thinks that might be harder with Steven there, watching him, making it realer with his kindness and concern.

They fall into a sullen silence when they get within gasping distance of the city. Ryan knows why it has to be this way; he knows the reasons he wants it are the very reasons he can’t have it. Their familiarity; their shared history; all the ways their lives are already twined together: the appeal is the very same as the reason it would probably be a monumental disaster.

It’s just hard for Ryan to accept, is all. He’s always felt pretty strongly that nothing’s better than a good thing except more of that thing. As a kid, he’d eat himself sick because the idea of _too much_ ice cream felt instinctively like nonsense, like the sort of bullshit that adults would tell you so you’d be as joyless as them.

And later, when he was throwing up exactly like his mom said he would, he’d think it had been worth it.

Ryan still feels like that kid, and the self-denial feels as unnatural now as it did then.

*

Shane kisses him for the last time outside a rest stop ten miles away from the I-5.

“Pull over,” Shane says suddenly. “Take this exit.”

Ryan doesn’t argue; he just pulls off, pulls into the lot of a little visitor’s center, and puts the car in park. There are other cars and SUVs all around them, people unloading for bathroom breaks, families stretching their legs or walking their dogs after a long car ride.

He knows it’s the last time because Shane as good as tells him so, cupping his jaw, pressing his thumb into the hollow of his cheekbone like he could leave a fingerprint there.

“One more for the road,” he says, and it’s a good line, fucking _cinematic_. He smiles like he knows it as he leans across the center console and kisses Ryan softly on the mouth.

He pulls away again too soon, and Ryan has to ask.

“We can’t, right?” Ryan asks. He _knows_ it, but he still needs to hear it. It’s just that he thinks it’s possible there are times when the mature choice and the right choice are not the same, and he has this crazy gnawing fear that he might look back in three years or five or twenty and realize this was one of those times.

“We definitely can’t.” Shane doesn’t have to ask what he means.

“And that’s because…”

Shane starts rattling reasons off like a litany, like he’s been making a mental list the whole damn trip, reciting it over and over. “Because we work together. Because we own a company together, and when we destroy each other—and we will—we’ll also destroy the other person who signed contracts with us, not to mention half a dozen employees who are counting on us.”

Ryan makes a face, but it’s true.

“Because until four days ago you exclusively liked women and you’re going to remember that in the really near future, and then I’d hate you. Because I could never give you the kind of life you want, and then you’d hate _me_. Because it would be temporary and selfish and stupid.”

Ryan thinks that might be _less_ true, on all counts, but he can’t blame Shane for thinking it.

“But mostly because you’re that guy,” Shane says. “You’re that guy who takes an amazing once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Paris and spends the next two years talking about how he’s just gotta move to Paris, he’d be _so happy_ in Paris. And then he finally moves there and he realizes it’s just a place like anywhere else.”

“But Paris isn’t even on my bucket list,” Ryan says, baffled by this sudden skid into metaphor.

“Whatever, the place isn’t—that’s not the point. I’m just saying that all your problems will still exist in Paris, Ryan. You only liked it so much in the first place because you were on vacation.”

“That’s not fair,” Ryan says, and he hates how it comes out—how petulant, how defensive. How exactly he sounds like that guy.

He doesn’t _feel_ like that guy.

*

By the time they pull into the Hertz lot an hour later to return the rental, Ryan’s convinced that Shane’s wrong, actually. He’s wrong and stupid and scared and _wrong_ and Ryan’s simply going to have to fight him on it. So it’s lucky that he’s had five years of practice.

Ryan turns off the engine, but he doesn’t get out of the car.

“Okay, well,” Shane says. “This is, uh. Our stop.”

“No,” Ryan says.

Shane scratches his nose. He sits back in his seat. Then he reaches for his door handle.

Ryan locks the car.

“Did you just—”

“Maybe.”

“You can’t just lock us in the car and insist the vacation can never end because we can never get out.”

“Bet you I can.”

“I can unlock my own door from right here,” Shane points out. He flips the switch, unlocking his door, but before he can get it open Ryan locks it again from his side. “_Ryan_.”

“I’m not finished,” Ryan says. “I let you say your piece, didn’t I? All that bullshit about Paris, talking me in circles and hoping I wouldn’t notice what you really meant. Sucks for you that I know all your tricks.”

“It wasn’t bullshit,” Shane starts, annoyed, but Ryan does feel pretty strongly that it’s his turn to talk now, and he holds up his hand.

“Stop. Just stop it. Were you ever going to tell me?”

“Tell you?”

“That you’re in _love_ with me,” Ryan says.

He’s sort of annoyed Shane’s making him spell it out like this. Shane was there too, last night. Shane knows what that was.

Shane gawps at him, actually _gawps_ open-mouthed, and that’s satisfying. Ryan crosses his arms over his chest. He can wait.

Shane closes his mouth. He looks out the window, runs his thumb over the metal of the door handle like he’s still considering his escape. Then he just—deflates.

“No,” he says eventually. “Never.”

Which, okay. Points for honesty, Ryan supposes. It’ll be a wash after he takes points away for general cowardice. 

“And you didn’t think I might want to know that?”

Shane smiles, rueful. “Well, you never asked.”

Ryan doesn’t bother to point out that it would never have even occurred to him to ask.

“There was less than no point,” Shane says, following him there anyway. “This weekend was—great, don’t get me wrong, I—it was more than I ever thought I’d—just. Don’t ruin it, okay? Can’t it just be this, this _gift_, this one totally unspoiled good thing?”

And yeah, maybe. Maybe it could be that. But the problem is that Ryan would always _wonder_, he would always have one foot out the door of every new relationship. He’d always have one eye on the calendar.

“I just think,” he says, taking a deep breath, “that you shouldn’t have promised to marry me in ten years if what you meant was that you’d do it today.”

Shane’s face closes off like he’s drawn a blind over it. He unlocks his door and opens it, and Ryan doesn’t stop him this time. He gets out of the car, and he slams the door, and he walks away—doesn’t even bother to get his bag from the trunk.

Ryan still doesn’t get out of the car.

He wonders what the guy at the Hertz counter thinks, if he’s watching all this unfold. Maybe it’s the most interesting thing he’s seen all day, trapped behind that counter, handing keys to people perpetually on their way somewhere else. Maybe he’s texting his group chat about it.

Ryan sits there for, like, a long time. Probably an hour, just baking in the sun. He feels like he’s in a game of chicken with the Hertz guy now, although probably the dude will attribute Ryan’s reluctance to the jacked-up suspension on the poor Civic.

Finally there’s a knock on the passenger window, and Ryan thinks he’s won the game of chicken, but when he turns his head to look it’s Shane. Ryan had thought he’d be home by now.

“Back, are you?” he asks, rolling down the window a few inches.

“I remembered you weren’t supposed to leave babies unattended in a hot car,” Shane says. “What are you doing?

“I’m staging a sit-in,” Ryan says, realizing as he says it that it’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s a one-man protest.

“You do get that comparing your stubborn refusal to hear the word ‘no’ to the Civil Rights Movement is, like, really offensive, right?” Shane says, but he gets back in the car and settles back in his seat with a heavy sigh. “What are you hoping to accomplish here?”

“I hadn’t thought it through all the way,” Ryan admits. “I was sort of thinking I’d sit here until you felt sorry enough for me to agree to date me.”

“And does that move usually work for you?”

“I’m trying a lot of new things this week. Jury’s still out.”

“I don’t know, Ryan,” Shane says. “Doesn’t it seem improbable?”

“What, us? I mean, yeah, people will be pretty fuckin’ shocked, but—”

“No. Doesn’t it seem improbable that we’d be allowed to—I don’t know. To have everything? The dream job, the dream—whatever. People don’t get to have everything they want, as a rule.”

Ryan’s good at what he does, but he knows a lot of his success is down to luck: the luck of being born a dude with a good jawline, to parents who loved him and each other and had the means to send him to college. The luck to stumble upon the BuzzFeed fellowship program and apply on a whim, even though he didn’t really think much would come of it. The luck of the YouTube algorithm plucking one four-minute true crime video out of the ether, putting it in front of a few million eyeballs, and changing his life forever.

“I think it’s possible some people are just lucky bastards,” Ryan says. “I think maybe some people get to be really stupid happy and there’s no logic or reason in it. I know that makes you uncomfortable, not being able to explain shit, but like. Why _not_ you?”

Shane takes off his glasses. He runs his hand through his hair and over his eyes before he puts them back on. Even now, upset, forced to do his very least favorite thing in the world—talk about feelings, _gross_—he looks good to Ryan. He looks like the face Ryan wants to see every day.

“What you said would still be true,” he says. “Double-true. It would be hard, and complicated, and so, _so_ public.”

“Yeah, but when it’s you it’s worth it.” Shane looks at him then, finally, and Ryan shrugs. “I’m not afraid of it, if it’s you.”

That’s not quite true. Of course Ryan’s afraid of it. But he’s afraid of it the way he was afraid to quit BuzzFeed, the way he was afraid to funnel tens of thousands of dollars of his own savings into an _idea_ of a company, the way he was afraid to sign the paperwork on Watcher. Which is to say that the fear is how he knows he’s supposed to do it.

Ryan locks the car door again, just for emphasis, just to make Shane smile.

“Say it. If you don’t say it we’re going to die of heatstroke in this car. I think we can agree that would be infinitely worse for our careers than if you just took me to see a movie and bought me a large popcorn and then took me back to your place and blew my back out like a reasonable person.”

“Fine,” Shane says. “_Fine_. Jesus. I cannot believe I am rewarding this strategy. Ryan, would you want to go out with me some time?”

“I think etiquette calls for the full name, actually.”

“Oh my god.” Shane blows air out his nose, making his own hair fly out. “Ryan Steven Bergara, you impossible piece of shit. Will you just get dinner with me or something?”

“And then go back with you to your place,” Ryan prompts, waving his hand for Shane to get on with it. “This is as bad as your little marriage proposal stunt, and don’t think we’re not talking about _that_ eventually, by the way.”

Shane rolls his eyes, but there’s a flush creeping down his neck, a bit of pink across the bridge of his nose like a sunburn. “I’ve created a monster.”

“Oh, buddy,” Ryan says, patting Shane on the shoulder. “You have no idea.”

*

When Ryan goes into the Hertz dealership to return the car at last, a full two hours after he pulled into the parking lot, the guy behind the counter raises his eyebrows.

“Thank god,” he says. “I’ve been dying here, and I’m off at five. So who won?”

“Me,” Ryan says, flashing him a big grin. He hands over the keys.

He’s never been more ready to see a vacation end.

*


End file.
